Real support vital to break toxic spiral

Drew Harris, the deputy chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland who was named as the next Garda commissioner yesterday, will know that his two immediate predecessors’ careers came to an end in a way that made Enoch Powell’s famous line about politics relevant to policing.

Powell warned that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs”.